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Lev Manovich lists two types of digitally altered reality: virtual reality and augmented reality. He defines the latter as ” the laying of dynamic and context-specific information over the visual field of a user”. Two lectures yesterday at the Alan Turing Institute on smart cities, by Prof Phil Blythe and Prof Sir Alan Wilson make…

(This posting is culled mostly from two reports in Bloomberg, here and here. To save hyperlinking I have not repeated the citations everywhere.) Bloomberg said: “To outsiders, the Trump campaign often appears to be powered by little more than the candidate’s impulses and Twitter feed.” However, Bloomberg reporting makes clear that there was a serious…

According to The Guardian, Angela Merkel said recently that: ” “I’m of the opinion that algorithms must be made more transparent, so that one can inform oneself as an interested citizen about questions like ‘what influences my behaviour on the internet and that of others?’…Algorithms, when they are not transparent, can lead to a distortion…

As the Duke of Wellington reportedly said: “All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called “guessing what was at the other side of the hill.” Guesses have now been completely wrong in two…

In her concession speech, Hillary Clinton indirectly thanked “secret, private” Facebook support groups like Pantsuit Nation. (see for example Endgadget). This was a rather backhanded compliment: she added ‘I want everybody to come out from behind that and make sure your voices are heard’. An article in Vox subsequently explained about Pantsuit Nation: “the group…

I recently bought a copy of Gordon Pask’s 1982 book ‘Microman’, from betterworldbooks of Indiana for 41p (plus £2.80 postage.) It is an extraordinary book, though I can understand why it was never a great success. Firstly, it is a survey of the field: ICT as it was in 1982, with some very basic explanations…

There’s an exhibition of British conceptual art, 1964 – 79, at Tate Britain at the moment. The catalogue sees stages in the development of conceptual art: – new frameworks: slightly childish reaction against contemporary Modernist art as described by Clement Greenberg, although many early UK conceptual artists did not knowof US equivalents and worked in…